Cranberry Harvest Season in Richmond

Somewhere in the second week of October the fields on the east side of the city start looking wrong. Ground that was a dull green all summer turns the colour of old brick, and then a few days later some of it is underwater with a red skin floating on top. That is the cranberry harvest. It happens in Richmond every single year, mostly out of sight of the people who live here.

I spent my childhood in the middle of the island, and I did not properly understand that this was a cranberry city until I was working in food distribution and spent a whole fall driving between warehouses out past No. 6 Road. You cross Highway 99 and Richmond stops being a city. Flat fields, alder hedgerows, the odd greenhouse, and bogs.

The thing everybody gets wrong

Cranberries do not grow underwater. I have heard grown adults say this at parties.

They grow on low wiry perennial vines that mat over a bed of sand and peat, and for most of the season they sit on the surface like small hard beads. The water only turns up at the end. Each berry has little air pockets inside it, so when the grower floods the bed and knocks the fruit loose with a machine that churns the water, the berries come free and float. They get corralled into a bright red raft with floating booms and then pumped or lifted out. That is the wet harvest, and it is the one that makes the photographs.

Fruit that is going to be sold fresh gets picked dry instead, off an unflooded bed with a mechanical picker, because floating a berry around a bog does it no favours if you want it whole and pretty in a bag. Most of what grows here is not headed for a bag. It goes into juice and sauce and dried fruit, through a growers' co-op that runs a receiving operation on the east side of the city. In October you can hear the trucks before you see them.

Where the bogs actually are

East of Highway 99, broadly, and south of the river. If you want to look at them, the roads to know are Westminster Highway, Blundell Road and Steveston Highway running east, crossed by the numbered north-south roads from No. 5 out to No. 8. That whole quarter of the city sits in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is the only reason it still looks like this instead of looking like Brighouse.

No. 5 Road is the drive I would pick even without berries in it. The east side of that road is a run of temples, churches, a monastery, a mosque and a gurdwara, which is why people call it the Highway to Heaven, and the west side is farmland. You can pass a Sikh temple, a Buddhist monastery and a flooded cranberry bed inside two minutes. I have never got tired of that stretch.

One caution, because it needs saying every year. These are working farms in a short and expensive harvest window, not an attraction. The shoulders out there are narrow and the equipment is not cheap. Do not walk into a bed, do not put a drone over somebody's crop, and do not stop in a farm driveway to get your shot. Pull fully off the road or keep driving. Every October somebody does something thoughtless out there and the growers get a little less relaxed about the rest of us looking.

The farm event

The one operation set up to actually take visitors into a harvest is Richmond Country Farms, out on Steveston Highway toward the east end of the city. In past Octobers they have run a cranberry event built around a wagon ride out to the beds, with a market barn, food, pumpkins and a great many small children in gumboots. I am not going to quote you dates, prices, or whether it needs tickets, because that has moved around from year to year and it is exactly the sort of detail I would get wrong. Check the week before you go. If it does need booking, book early, because the good weekends go first.

What I will give you is the practical part. Wear boots you do not care about. It is a farm in October in the Fraser delta and the ground has opinions. Go in the morning if you want the light and the wagon without a queue. And take the drive out along Westminster Highway rather than the freeway, because that is half the pleasure of the trip.

Wild ones, no farm required

Before Lulu Island was drained and diked, a large part of the middle of it was raised peat bog. A remnant of that survives at the Richmond Nature Park on Westminster Highway near the highway interchange. There is a nature house at the trailhead and a set of flat, easy loops through bog forest: pine and birch, sphagnum, salal, Labrador tea, wild blueberry, and small wild bog cranberries down at ankle height if you know to look for them.

They are not quite the same plant as the commercial fruit and they are sour enough to fold a nine-year-old's face in half, which is most of their appeal. Leave them where they are. The point of that walk is not foraging. It is that it shows you what the entire middle of this city used to be, in October, when the bog smells like tea and wet wood.

What I do with them

I am a bad cook. I have said so in print before and I will keep saying it, because it makes the one thing I can do more believable.

Cranberry sauce is impossible to ruin. Berries, sugar, a splash of water, a strip of orange peel, low heat until they pop and it thickens. That is the whole method. Fresh local fruit makes a version that is nothing like the tin, and it freezes well, which matters because the fresh berries appear in a narrow window and then vanish until the following fall. Buy more than you think you need. Fruit from a farm stand tends to be firmer than supermarket fruit and lasts longer in the fridge.

Everything past sauce, I outsource. Around the Blundell and Garden City corner, Garden City Bakery and COBS Bread are both on a loop I already drive, and in the fall I go in and see what has turned up on the racks. Same with Steveston Bakery down at my end, and The Sweet Spot a couple of doors along, which is where I end up when I want cake and not virtue. I would not phone any of them ahead expecting cranberry specifically. Fall baking rotates and I would rather be surprised.

Eating on that side of the city

The east side is not restaurant country the way No. 3 Road is. But you are already out there, the kids are muddy, and nobody wants to drive twenty minutes back into the middle of town to eat.

Ironwood is the nearest cluster with anything to it. Fuggles Beer is a taproom on that side of the city and a good place to sit down with a beer, though if you have kids with you, phone first, because BC's rules on minors in a taproom are not the same everywhere. Boston Pizza Ironwood is Boston Pizza, and with a car full of pumpkins and a cold afternoon behind you that is not a criticism. Over on the Cambie side, Continental Seafood Restaurant does the big-round-table Chinese meal, which is what a farm day genuinely earns. Fogg N' Suds in that same part of the city is the sit-down-and-thaw option if you want something plainer.

Timing, honestly

The harvest is not a date on a calendar. It moves with the weather and it runs roughly from the back half of September into the end of October, farm by farm and bed by bed. The flooded ones look best in flat overcast light, which Richmond supplies generously. If you drive out and everything is dry, you are either early, late, or watching a farm do a dry pick for the fresh market. Come back next weekend.

And if you only ever see it from the car, that is fine too. Half the good of this season is the drive: fog sitting low over the fields at eight in the morning, the vines gone bronze, one red rectangle glowing in the middle of all that grey.

My favourite version of this is not the event at all. It is a bike ride out along Westminster Highway on a grey Tuesday, no crowd, one man in waders working a boom, and about four acres of floating red doing nothing in particular.

It is the one time of year Richmond looks like the delta it actually is.